


i can't arrest the sun (but i am trying)

by yanak324



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Arya deserves to conquer the world, F/M, Gendry deserves a goodbye, Hopeful Ending, Season 8 Episode 6 Missing Scene, but they deserve to end up together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 00:15:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18905569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yanak324/pseuds/yanak324
Summary: "So, you're running away?""No, I'm not.""Sounds like you are."Arya, Gendry and the goodbye that was promised. Spoilers for Season 8, Episode 6: The Iron Throne.





	i can't arrest the sun (but i am trying)

**Author's Note:**

> Generally, I am okay with the finale. It left the door open to so many possibilities and all the remaining Starks survived, which means a lot to me. One thing of course we didn't see is closure for Gendry and Arya, which is why my muse started needling me half way through a transcontinental flight. I don't own any of the characters and the title belongs to O.A.R. Enjoy :)

Her first thought upon seeing his silhouette against the setting sun is how well he fits here. 

He might not have been born a lord, and there could have been so many other outcomes to his story, but Arya is glad this is how it worked out in the end, a fitting conclusion to his journey. 

_Conclusion or beginning?_

Her mind is treacherous these days, two steps ahead of her heart at every turn. It’s perhaps why she came here as soon as she bid Jon farewell, but now can’t seem to cross the final threshold and say something. 

Words have never been her strong suit, but if anyone deserves them, it’s the man standing with his back to her, overlooking what’s left of his childhood home.

“Looks different from this angle, doesn’t it?” She steps forward and joins him shoulder to shoulder at the precipice. 

Gendry stills besides her but it’s brief and after a moment, he relaxes. 

“What does?” His voice is hoarse, probably from lack of use. 

Arya wonders how long he’s been standing here in what’s left of the Red Keep, watching over the city whose carnage cannot be properly seen or felt from this high up.

One look at Gendry though, and Arya knows he feels it all; is no stranger to common folk becoming collateral damage that is discarded and uncared for. 

_He cares,_ she thinks. He cares deeply and that’s why he’ll make a great lord. 

He’ll fight tooth and nail to make certain his people never get burned by tyranny. 

“The city you grew up in.” 

“Aye, it does.” 

He heaves a sigh that speaks to more than just the rubble and ash that’s left of King’s landing. 

It’s an acknowledgement of all the good, bad and ugly that he experienced on these streets. Breaking what little bread he had with his neighbors, forging weapons for the same people who murdered his father, and who would surely murder him eventually if not for a slip of a girl who pulled her Needle out one day and said “not today.” 

At least Arya imagines that’s what he’s reflecting on… 

She chances a glance at him and her breath catches in her throat. 

No matter how far west she goes, and how many exotic places she discovers, Arya knows she’ll never see a man this beautiful. 

It has nothing to do with the fine leather he’s dressed in or his confident stance. It has everything to do with his piercing cerulean gaze, his calloused hands that speak of strenuous labor, and his innate tenderness that he’s directed at her more than once. 

The latter makes her own heart plummet to her stomach as she thinks about the overwhelming regret of how she’d left things. How she’d turned him down with a hard slash across his heart. All because she had been afraid of hurting him more when he eventually learned that she had died by the sword of her vengeance. 

There’s no excuse now. Sandor told her to live and she will, but not before she makes things right between them, makes Gendry understand. 

She opens her mouth to speak, even though she has not a clue what she’s going to say, but Gendry beats her to it. 

“Davos told me he procured you a ship.” 

“Yes, he did.”

She isn’t sure why it’s so painful to admit it. She’d been elated, light as a feather on her feet, when she made the decision to go, when she realized she would no longer be tied down to traditions, to names, to lists. She could go wherever she pleased, far as the eye can see, of her own volition.

“And where will you set sail to?” 

She’s not used to this proper, reserved Gendry. A part of her really wants to irk him, rile him up somehow, but that inclination was all but snuffed out some time between entering the House of Black and White and regaining her eyesight. 

“West.” She replies simply, and immediately feels his eyes on her. 

It might be the first time they’ve been this close since that night in Winterfell, when he’d gotten on one knee and asked her for the impossible. That had been in a dark alcove, a charged moment shrouded in fire and dark shadows. 

Here, backlit by the orange, yellow and pink hues of the late afternoon sun, it seems less impossible to consider what he had asked. 

It’s equally difficult to avoid the intensity of Gendry’s stare – the one that betrays every emotion he’s feeling but won’t let himself say out loud. 

_“You’re running away?”_

_“No, I’m not.”_

_“Sounds like it.”_

_“Well, you were always stupid.”_

_“When it comes to you, yes.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Why, what?”_

_“Why are you stupid when it comes to me?”_

_“Isn’t it obvious?”_

_“No, not to me.”_

_“Now who is the stupid one?”_

She tears her gaze away from his then, because it’s too much, too much of a painful reminder of what could have been, if only she’d been different, if only she could be what he deserves. 

“They’ll write books about you.” Gendry says instead. 

She isn’t expecting the reverence in his tone, but it fills her with warmth all the same. It also makes her yearn, makes her wish for one brief indulgent moment that she wasn’t going alone, that he could be there at the helm of the ship with her when they set sail. 

Her mouth doesn’t open to ask, because it’s neither just nor fair. She’s asked too much of him already, and what if he says yes…what then? 

“As they will about you.” 

She looks at him as she says this, affection growing when she sees his confusion. 

“What of me? I’m no warrior, I’m no explorer, I am just a Lord –“

“A Lord who helped change the course of Westerosi history,” 

Gendry snorts, visibly eschewing her words. Arya bites her lip, feeling a burning desire to prove him wrong, make him see himself the way she sees him. 

If only she knew the right thing to say. 

“If you insist on being bullheaded, I’ll need to remind you.” 

She turns to him then, and takes his hand, glad for the warm Southern climate removing the need for gloves. The callouses on his palms call to mind a distant memory of careful fingers tracing her scars like they were something precious, something worthy of admiration. 

Gendry looks just as bewildered as he did that day, eyes tracking her movements in disbelief as she undressed and slid on top of him, pressing her very soul against him.

Arya hadn’t known it then, isn’t sure when the realization hit her – she thinks of falling rubble and a former enemy turned friend urging her to live – but it’s so clear now. As blinding sunrays cut across his face, bathing him in a light that makes him look almost regal, she knows she loves this man, loves him with all her heart. 

Also knows there will never another like him. She wants so badly for him to live the most meaningful life he can. It’s what he deserves, even if it’s without her by his side.

“You are Gendry Baratheon, a Lord who has forged weapons that protected the Realms of Men, who has saved countless lives, rich and poor alike. A Lord who did not hesitate to protect a stranger girl masquerading as a boy even when she made it nearly impossible to do so. The same Lord who will put his people first above all else, because he knows what it’s like to live with nothing. A Lord who will restore Storm’s End to greatness and prosperity.” 

There’s a bead of silence as she traces the impact of her words on him. He averts his gaze and it’s so evident, he is blushing, but she knows how much this means to him. If possible, it endears him more to her, and she has to quell the urge to pull him closer. 

“Well, when you put it like that…” Gendry grants her a smile that exposes his teeth, the kind she has not seen in far too long. 

“It’s the truth.” Arya reasserts, as if wanting to imprint these words on his brain. Even if she wasn’t in love with him, she’d still think just as highly of him; so proud of the man he has become.

It feels like it happened in the blink of an eye and not for the first time since finding him here, it hurts knowing that she will not be here to watch him become the great leader she knows he will be. 

“Thank you.” 

For some reason, this catches her off guard. 

“Don’t thank me. I don’t deserve it.” 

Gendry frowns but doesn’t correct her, merely squeezes her hand. 

“I hurt you.”

It’s not a question, it’s a fact, and one she feels more remorse for than anything else she’s ever done. 

“You were honest.” 

And that’s the crux of it, really. She wasn’t honest with him then, and she’s not being honest with him now. Lying by omission is still lying. 

Arya doesn’t even realize she’s shaking her head until she has already reached up and captured his cheek in her other palm, eyes searching over his in a silent plea to understand. 

“I was only honest about what I’m not, not about what I feel or what I want.” 

“And what is it that you want?” 

His breath skirts her cheek, and it feels like the sun has disappeared beneath the horizon on purpose, to give them this private moment. Arya swallows against the dryness in her throat, courage dissipating the longer she confronts the intensity of Gendry’s stare. 

And isn’t it the most ironic thing in the world, that the Protector of the Seven Realms, the Nightslayer, the Springbringer can be so cowardly when it comes to matters of heart. 

Arya Stark, though, isn’t a coward, and never has been. 

“You. All I ever really wanted was you. Not your castle, not your title, not your weapons, just you, Gendry. You’ve always been more than enough for me.” 

It’s what her teenage-self had tried to tell him years ago. It’s what she had thought the moment she stepped into the Winterfell forge and saw him melting down Dragonglass, and it’s what she had so desperately wanted to say before she left to die in King’s Landing… 

Arya is not sure what she’s expecting in response but his warm lips descending on hers is a welcome surprise. She reciprocates eagerly, knowing that this is as much a culmination of the words they’ve never said to each other, as it is a farewell. 

She wants to savor it, to drown herself in his lips, in his tongue, in his hands banded around her waist; wants to commit it all to memory and take her fill before it disappears. 

They separate eventually and then she’s left with pure unadulterated warmth. The kind that can seduce her into staying, and Gendry knows it too. His smile is rueful as he glances down at her, and his kiss on her forehead is very brief. 

“You have me, Arya. You always have and you always will.” 

It’s perhaps more of a proclamation of commitment and devotion than a marriage proposal. Yet it doesn’t scare her, or put her off, or make her want to run. 

No, it makes her want to step closer and meld herself to this man, who does understand her after all, who knows who she is and loves her anyway. 

Arya wraps her arms around him without hesitation, pressing her cheek against the leather of his chest; reveling in the way the sigil of a stag pushes back against her skin. 

“Not always,” she whispers, “you’ll need heirs eventually, and I don’t know that I can give you that.” 

She looks up at him then, expecting to see the disappointment she feels mirrored in his eyes, but there’s nothing but serenity in his expression.

“If the King of the Six Kingdoms doesn’t need heirs for succession, perhaps the Lord of Storm’s End doesn’t either. Don’t you think?” 

The realization washes over her like the hot springs she frequented as a child. If Gendry were not holding her, she reckons her legs would buckle under his implication. 

“You’d do that? For me?” 

“I’d do it for us both.” He explains, tightening his grip on her, “I don’t much want to be wed to a highborn Lady when my heart lies with a fierce she-wolf who prefers a sack of grain to a featherbed.” 

Arya doesn’t even try to hide her blush, but she does wonder.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.” 

“That’s alright,” Gendry smiles down at her.

“I’m a patient man. If you recall, I did row these very waters for quite some time.” 

He gestures towards the horizon, where the sun has all but disappeared beneath the dark blue depths of the sea. 

Arya knows he means it partially in jest, but there’s a weight to his expression that illuminates everything that’s left unsaid, a promise just between them two and no one else.

_“I love you, and I will let you go. As long as you come back to me.”_

_“I will.”_

_“Good.”_

_“And Gendry?”_

_“Yes?”_

_“I love you too.”_

He turns to look silently ahead instead. Arya twists in their embrace so she can watch the coastline with him, side by side. 

“Gendry.”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.” 

He doesn’t ask what for, and she doesn’t tell him. She figures she’ll save that for the next time they see each other. 

xxx


End file.
